Zhaoming Qian - Böcker

No literary figure of the past century - in America or perhaps in any other Western country - is comparable to Ezra Pound in the scope and depth of his exchange with China. To this day, scholars and students still find it puzzling that this influential poet spent a lifetime incorporating Chinese language, literature, history, and philosophy into Anglo-American modernism. How well did Pound know Chinese? Was he guided exclusively by eighteenth to nineteenth-century orientalists in his various Chinese projects? Did he seek guidance from Chinese peers? Those who have written about Pound and China have failed to address this fundamental question. No one could do so just a few years ago when the letters Pound wrote to his Chinese friends were sealed or had not been found. This book brings together 162 revealing letters between Pound and nine Chinese intellectuals, eighty-five of them newly opened up and none previously printed. Accompanied by editorial introductions and notes, these selected letters make available for the first time the forgotten stories of Pound and his Chinese friends. They illuminate a dimension in Pound's career that has been neglected: his dynamic interaction with people from China over a span of forty-five years from 1914 until 1959. This selection will also be a documentary record of a leading modernist's unparalleled efforts to pursue what he saw as the best of China, including both his stumbles and his triumphs.

Ezra Pound and China, the first collection to explore the American poet's career-long relationship with China, considers how Pound's engagement with the Orient broadens the textual, cultural, and political boundaries of his modernism. The book's contributors discuss, among other topics, issues of cultural transmission; the influence of Pound's Chinese studies on twentieth-century poetics; the importance of his work to contemporary theories of translation; and the effects of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism on Pound's political and economic thought.Richly illustrated, the book draws readers closer to the heart of Pound's vision. Ezra Pound and China will become an invaluable resource to students and scholars of Pound, cultural studies, translation theory, poetics, Confucianism, and literary transmission and reception.Zhaoming Qian is Professor of English, the University of New Orleans.

First published in 1915, Cathay, Ezra Pound’s early monumental work, originally contained fourteen translations from the Chinese and a translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer.” Over time, these poems have been widely read and loved as both translations and original poetry. In 1916, Cathay was reprinted in the book Lustra without “The Seafarer” and with four more Chinese poems. Cathay is greatly indebted to the notes of a Harvard-trained scholar Ernest Fenollosa. “In Fenollosa’s Chinese poetry materials,” Pound scholar Zhaoming Qian writes, “Pound discovered a new model that at once mirrored and challenged his developing poetics.” Edited by Qian, this centennial edition reproduces for the first time the text of the original publication plus the poems from Lustra and transcripts of all the relevant Fenollosa notes and Chinese texts. Also included is a new foreword by Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary de Rachewiltz, providing an appreciation and fascinating background material on this pivotal work of Pound’s oeuvre.

What role did Chinese art play in the poetic development of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens? How could they share Chinese artists' Dao, an aesthetic held to be beyond verbal representation? In this sequel to ""Orientalism and Modernism"", Zhaoming Qian investigates the ways in which these three modernist poets received Chinese artistic notions and assimilated them into their literary masterpieces. With 40 rare and previously unpublished photographs presented with accompanying analysis, this study reconstructs the three poets' dialogue with the Chinese masters. In addition to examining ""Canto 49"", ""Nine Nectarines"" and ""Six Significant Landscapes"", by Pound, Moore and Stevens respectively, Qian provides additional historical and cultural material. ""The Modernist Response to Chinese Art"" pays long-overdue attention to the role of several early collections of Chinese art in England and America; it clarifies some common misconceptions about Confucianism and Daoism; it identifies in the modernist poets both linkage to and revolt against their predecessors' - and peers' - hegemonic Orientalism; and it intensifies awareness of modernist Orientalism not as a monolithic and constant conception, but as a slippery and shifting process.

In East-West Exchange and Late Modernism, Zhaoming Qian examines the nature and extent of Asian influence on some of the literary masterpieces of Western late modernism. Focusing on the poets William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, Qian relates captivating stories about their interactions with Chinese artists and scholars and shows how these encounters helped ignite a return to their early experimental modes. After studying Chinese poetry, Williams published his celebrated set of poems ""The Cassia Tree."" Exposure to the Tao and its doctrines renewed Moore’s style. Qian presents a lost lecture by Moore on the subject, transcribed here for the first time. Pound was equally influenced by Confucianism and by, as Qian demonstrates, anthropological studies of the spiritualism and pictographic language of the little-known Naxi people of southwest China. Qian’s sinuous readings expand our understanding of late modernism by bringing into focus its heightened attention to meaning in space, obsession with imaginative sensibility, and enlarged respect for harmony between humanity and nature.

In East-West Exchange and Late Modernism, Zhaoming Qian examines the nature and extent of Asian influence on some of the literary masterpieces of Western late modernism. Focusing on the poets William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, Qian relates captivating stories about their interactions with Chinese artists and scholars and shows how these encounters helped ignite a return to their early experimental modes. After studying Chinese poetry, Williams published his celebrated set of poems ""The Cassia Tree."" Exposure to the Tao and its doctrines renewed Moore’s style. Qian presents a lost lecture by Moore on the subject, transcribed here for the first time. Pound was equally influenced by Confucianism and by, as Qian demonstrates, anthropological studies of the spiritualism and pictographic language of the little-known Naxi people of southwest China. Qian’s sinuous readings expand our understanding of late modernism by bringing into focus its heightened attention to meaning in space, obsession with imaginative sensibility, and enlarged respect for harmony between humanity and nature.